Following the Canon in Fictional Universes 

• Lucasfilm

"Is that canon?"

It's a question you often hear in geek circles. You'll hear it alongside phrases like, "That's not canon," "That's not my canon," and "This is my head-canon."

So what is "canon?" Why is it useful in some cases? And why is there too much attention paid to it?

I've asked myself this a lot.

In the simplest terms, canon is the rules or history of a particular universe that the creatives making new content have to adhere to. Fandom took the word from religious circles; "canon" comes from Latin and means "a rule or law." We'd use it to canonize saints or talk about the various gospels dead white folks determined to be the canon of the New Testament.

To be honest, that religious fervor is not unlike what we see in the worlds of fandom today. Many of the fights over what is and isn't canon seem to center around what we like and what we don't like. Sometimes the line blurs, and we get things we do like out of the things we hate.

In the Star Wars universe, for example, the canon is anything George Lucas worked on prior to his sale to Disney—the films and The Clone Wars animated TV show—and anything published or produced by Lucasfilm after April 14, 2014. Anything published before that is where inspiration can be drawn from, but none of the new creatives need to be tied to that. And, honestly, I think this is for the best. Can you imagine if J.J. Abrams and Rian Johnson tried making films handcuffed to 20 years of novels that ranged from great—like Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire trilogy—to actively terrible?

Why does it matter to creatives? Well, they need to agree to a set of rules and events in the universe in order to tell meaningful stories going forward, and have it all make sense. But that doesn't mean you have to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.

Did you know that parts of the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special have been brought into the current canon? Life Day—the holiday created for that hilariously bad TV special—is something celebrated officially in the universe. Boba Fett's rifle, first introduced on that holiday special, became the signature weapon of The Mandalorian.

Some folks, however, get hung up on what is currently in the canon. In Star Wars, there are some still upset that the new movies didn't follow the old Expanded Universe books. Some folks create their own canon by saying things like, "The Skywalker Saga ended with The Last Jedi," or "The only thing I care about are the books, the rest is history." And so on.

And that's fine! I think it's important to have different interpretations and iterations. We've been doing this in comic books for years. Can you imagine the nightmare if the Marvel Cinematic Universe tried to adhere strictly to the comics continuity? Hell, the comics continuity in the Marvel 616 universe alone—the one that includes most of the familiar characters now used in the Marvel Cinematic Universe—gets a loose reset every time a new artist and writer team come on board a project. No one complains that the movies don't exactly follow the comics, but they certainly follow the spirit of the comics.

And really, in the end, that's what the canon is: The spirit of the thing you're viewing. Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, Marvel, DC, all of it. They're just interpretations of the thing you love.

Think about it like you would remakes of King Kong. None of the future iterations of that film were shackled to the original 1933 masterpiece. Each generation added to the spirit of the thing by interpreting it in their own way, and that's okay. Maybe fifty years from now they'll do the same with Star Wars. Or they'll just keep breaking through new frontiers of the timeline and show us something new that way.

Regardless of what "the canon" is, though, the most important thing is to be open to the storytelling of the person telling us the story. Forget about all you know. It's like Yoda said of the cave; the only thing you'll find there is what you take with you. And if you bring biases and preconceived notions about what "should have been," only pain will you find.

Try to open your mind to the possibilities. Let creatives do their work. You might find that they've taught you something new about the story you wanted, and you'll find the story you wanted wasn't the story you needed after all.